Banks team up with their FinTech competitors
These are challenging times for the incumbent heavyweights of the financial services sector. Beset by regulatory, governance, technological, capital, and investment issues, they are increasingly facing competition for business from a whole host of new players, primarily from ‘FinTechs’. Growth of marketplace lending In the case of online lenders, this trend began in the UK in the mid-2000s when Zopa, the world’s first digital and now Europe’s largest peer-to-peer (now called marketplace) provider, launched, quickly followed by the likes of Prosper, Lending Club, and OnDeck in the US. Eleven years on, Zopa has lent around 1.8 billion pounds to more than 150,000 borrowers funded by 63,000 investors of whom 53,000 […]
EY FinTech Australia Census 2016
FinTech Australia and EY Sweeney release the most comprehensive analysis of Australia’s fintech ecosystem to date, the EY FinTech Australia Census 2016 FinTech Australia and EY Sweeney are today releasing the inaugural EY FinTech Australia Census 2016, the most comprehensive and detailed report on the Australian fintech industry to date. The research was formally launched in Melbourne today by EY’s Anita Kimber at FinTech Australia’s national summit, Collab/Collide 2016 in partnership with LaunchVic. This significant piece of research was commissioned by FinTech Australia as part of their efforts to foster a thriving fintech ecosystem in Australia. The report identifies important characteristics of the Australian fintech industry, and establishes a set […]
Fintech could be bigger than ATMs, PayPal, and Bitcoin combined
We’ve entered the most profound era of change for financial services companies since the 1970s brought us index mutual funds, discount brokers and ATMs. No firm is immune from the coming disruption and every company must have a strategy to harness the powerful advantages of the new financial technology (“fintech”) revolution. The battle already underway will create surprising winners and stunned losers among some of the most powerful names in the financial world: The most contentious conflicts (and partnerships) will be between startups that are completely reengineering decades-old practices, traditional power players who are furiously trying to adapt with their own innovations, and total disruption of established technology & processes: […]
Major Australian fintech Tyro just hired the UBank founder as its CEO
UBank founder Gerd Schenkel has been hired as Tyro Payments’ new CEO to build the fintech company’s next-generation bank. Schenkel has been hired by Tyro, Australia’s fast-growing nextGen banking institution, to run an ambitious growth plan and a strong public advocacy campaign. “When someone of Gerd’s talent becomes available you grab the opportunity with both hands,” says current CEO Jost Stollmann. “Now that Tyro has a bank licence and $100 million in new capital, Gerd joining the Tyro team as new CEO is the last piece needed to deliver very strong growth in the years ahead.” Stollmann, the company’s largest shareholder, will continue as a full time executive director. Gerd […]
A financial market on your phone – innovation winner’s next goal
A university professor, whose fraud-detection computer program has revolutionised the world’s financial markets and won the Prime Minister’s Innovation Prize, has a bigger goal in sight – creating a financial market on your phone. Professor Michael Aitken and his team created the SMARTS system, which catches insider trading and market manipulation around the world with such success it was sold in 2010 for $90 million to the world’s largest exchange company, the US-based Nasdaq. That sale helped fund a new generation of research entrepreneurs under Professor Aitken’s Capital Markets Cooperative Research Centre, which is using the same technology to pick up fraud, abuse, waste and over-servicing in the health and […]
Morgan Stanley’s Jeffrey McMillan says collaboration is key in fintech
It makes more sense for a global banking giant such as Morgan Stanley to collaborate with innovative fintech start-ups than to try to be innovative itself, according to the bank’s chief analytics and data officer, Jeffrey McMillan. “Probably 75 per cent of our technology that we build is coming from the fintech sector,” Mr McMillan told The Economist’s Finance Disrupted conference in New York. “We don’t really want to be innovators — that’s not what we’re really good at. “We have $US2 trillion ($2.8 trillion) of assets, 2.2 million customers, 16,000 advisers and that’s our intellectual capital. But we’re not known for being nimble and quick. ”But the bank wants […]
ANZ, Wells Fargo test blockchain for cross-border payments
Blockchain technology promises to reduce the time and cost of transferring funds and increase access to liquidity, according to ANZ Banking Group and Wells Fargo. The companies made the comments following the completion of a six-month project that built and tested a distributed ledger for reconciling and settling payments between the two banks. In a recent report on their “proof on concept” the banks said blockchain could “add real value to both the customer experience and the efficiency” of correspondent banking relationships, which refers to deals between global banks over access to local payment systems. “Cross-border payments and correspondent banking are ripe for rejuvenation,” ANZ and Wells Fargo said, pointing […]
NAB is opening its data vaults for fintechs
NAB chief executive Andrew Thorburn says he will support moves to require banks to share customer data, a key requirement for fintechs to compete with the big players. “We welcome competition,” he told the House of Representatives economics committee. “That’s how this bank has survived and competed for 150 years. “And now we’ve got new competition, fintechs that are coming at us and we welcome that too. You have to lift and get better and that’s good for customers.” Thorburn also supports greater account portability, where a customer could more easily move to a new bank without having to change automatic payments. In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority […]
